Duty of care

In tort law, a duty of care is a legal obligation requiring a person to adhere to a standard of reasonable care so as to avoid careless acts that could foreseeably harm others, and it is the foundational element a claimant must establish, along with its breach, to bring a successful negligence claim. The concept can be understood as a formalization of the implicit social obligations people and organizations owe one another, and courts have developed and expanded it through common law precedent rather than only through statute. Early common law confined the duty to parties in privity with one another, but during the later Industrial Revolution courts recognized that strictly requiring privity produced unjust results in product liability disputes, and a series of influential decisions from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century broadened the duty to protect a wider range of foreseeably affected parties. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/